Rachael Maves: Hi everyone, you are listening to the Rachael Maves podcast and I'm Rachael Maves, your host. Today we are speaking with Nick Greer. Nick is the principal consultant and founder of Halocline Consulting and guide at Fearless Guides, with over 21 years of experience in education and systemic reform. Previously, he served as executive VP at Thread and worked at Baltimore City Schools as director of science and a high school biology teacher. He was named Baltimore City School City Teacher of the Year and served as a teaching ambassador fellow in the US Department of Education. In 2010, he was honored to be selected as a teaching ambassador fellow at the United States Department of Education, where he worked in the office of the secretary during the Obama administration, which Nick, I had no.

Idea. So, I definitely want to hear a little bit more about that, but thanks for joining today. Yeah.

Rachael Maves: So tell me a little bit about how you ended up choosing a career in education. What led to that path?

Nick Greer: Oh, wow. Let's see where to start. I think if my mom were here, she would say that she knew from the beginning. I had like a little like a desk, like a chalkboard desk, and I would like sit at it and just like write all the time and like do lessons with like stuffies and stuff. That was in like. 1984, right?

And I like, totally rejected that idea. Like, totally, like as a as a young adult, I grew up in a rural part of Pennsylvania, southeastern Pennsylvania. There's really not that much around. And I needed to get out of town as badly as I could at 18. And I was a first generation collegegoer. And I was just like, I'm done with all this.

I don't want to do any of it. I'm going to go get a neuroscience degree and work in a lab. And that's it, right? And so I left. We needed instate tuition, since I was in first generation college go. We didn't really have that much money.

And I went to the University of Pittsburgh. And I got into science, the hard sciences, biology, all that kind of stuff. And I just struggled like struggled. I mean, mightily. And I still loved science. I still love neuroscience, but I just didn't really like the idea of working in a lab.

And I didn't see a way. And one day, I mean, I was having one of those like existential crises that one has when they're 21 or 22, I guess, right? And, I ended up, a friend of mine was like going to this after school program in Pittsburgh and it was like this middle school, elementary, upper elementary, middle school after school care program at like a church, like a local. Church. And we walked to it from campus and I started looking around and I was like: who are these kids? Where is this?

What is this? What's going on? And I mean it was like chaos in this space and I just kept going back and kept going back and there wasn't really much for us to do there besides, like they were like just keep eyes on kids, kind of thing. And I didn't really understand what that meant. And then one day I was there and I was like talking to another adult and this I like heard this crash in the corner. And I turned and I looked and there was this like young.

Girl. She must have been like I don't know fourth or fifth grade or whatever, and I she had thrown this thing she was playing with like across the room and it like shattered into pieces and I was like what happened? And I walked over and she's just like angry and I realized what she was playing with. She was playing with one of these like it's like a threedimensional puzzle, has like cogs and wheels. Oh, sure thing. And, like you, the whole objective is to build it so that you spin this part and this other part spins right.

And she's like just having a hard time with. It. And I, as I was walking over, I like kneelled down and I got like I kind of like connected with her and I started asking her some questions and then I started telling her some stories about how I would get like angry about like problems. And it was like embarrassing that I would get angry and I like kind of ingratiated myself for a moment and she like kind of connected a little bit and then I was like: so you want to, you want to pick these pieces up? And so we picked the pieces up and I started asking her questions about the layout of. It.

And then, after I asked like one or two questions, she just like figured it out and started like doing, and she was so happy that she started running around the room like telling everybody, like carrying it from place to place. Look what I did. Look what I did. Look what I did. And I just sat there and I was like, mom was right. Like I am, this is what I do for the rest of my life.

You know. And so like literally like people tell these stories, but literally the next day I walked to the registister's office and the education department and I asked: what does it take for me to turn my biology degree and my neuroscience credits into a degree in education? And they were like: you're almost done, finish the biology degree and get your master's in education. Right, there's these two courses that you need to take in the next year. And so I did like prerex And I did that, and then I started teaching in. Pittsburgh.

I got my masters then and I came to Baltimore and I've been doing it ever since. In and out in different ways. So like I was a teacher for eight years total. I worked in administrative work. I worked as federal government for a year in a fellowship. And then I kind of pivoted and worked in a nonprofit organization, but it was still education based, but it was relationship education based.

So on paper it looked like mentoring work, but really it was empowering people to build relationships with one another across lines of difference and kind of restitching Baltimore back together across its red. Lines. And we really learned a lot about what it takes to like help people see the humanity in others and to see themselves in others, and perspective taking and that initial relationship building that I started with, right? That's how you, that's how you educate. Yes. Is letting people feel like they have a sense of belonging.

And connecting with them at a deep and vulnerable level, like the safe I've. I've been doing that ever since.

Rachael Maves: I love that, Nick. So, tell me a little bit about, like, the consulting work that you're doing now, and where's that throughine and how do you see that continuing to play out?

Nick Greer: Yeah. Yeah. So, like at Halocline, my company, we help organizations and leaders go through transitions. And I'll just give the story behind the name for a second, and then I'll talk about some of the other work that we do, too. So, the name is it's. It itarkens back to my biology.

Degree. It also hearkens back to the backyard of where I was born in Baltimore, which is where I'm sitting right now. The Chesapeake Bay, Ches Bay is a halocline on a really large scale. And a halocline just means basically like when fresh water meets salt water. The mixture of those two things. So you can see this like really acutely in like a cenote or something if you do cave diving, but when you have fresh water and saltwater mix, there's this blurry section between the two before you get through it, right?

Yeah. And so it's like when you're swimming in fresh water and then you go through to salt water, you've got to go through this really messy middle called the halo. Point. And I feel like that's really a huge analogy for how disorienting change is and how disorienting transitions are. And so Halocline supports organizations and people to go through those transitions, u leaders to kind of like lead change and manage change and sustain change. Which I think is wildly important today, as we sit here and have this conversation.

Given you know it's the still beginning quarter of 2025. Yeah. Things are changing. Yeah. Okay. And I also do this work on a larger scale with a larger company called Fearless Guides.

I'm a guide. And I support organizations to go through not just transitions but also to do like strategy development and to determine like what their vision is, and do like guiding and coaching, executive coaching style kind of work. And it all comes down to, like I said at the beginning, like building a relationship to establish trust and then be having enough trust to be able to like speak vulnerably who you are and then being able to move from that onto how do we connect with other leaders and other people to kind of bring the best out of them. Yeah. And so, yeah, that's kind of where I've. Been.

Rachael Maves: I love it. And I love that the story that you tell about connecting with the student, like that you're grounding it first in empathy and connecting as humans, and then you get to the space of now: how do we move forward? And it's just like it's such a, it seems so common sense and yet it's something that I think we all could use a little bit more practice with.

Nick Greer: Yeah, I think the hardest part, in my opinion, at least it has been for me and I don't know about you, Rachael, but the hardest part, I think, is connecting with yourself. First. Yeah, you got to figure out, really, who are you once you know that part and what are your hang-ups? What are the things that like really trigger you? What are the pieces of like another person? The things you see that sort of I don't know, grind your gears, the pet peeves, the things that throw you off.

I mean, we see this a lot as parents, you know, and then when you can understand that, then you can connect through those. I think you know Brené Brown says really well:. We don't ever have the same lived experiences as another person, right, but we do have the same feelings and emotions and so if you can connect at the emotional level, like I know what it means to feel, sad, to feel, angry, to feel, but I don't I didn't have the same experience that led me to that. But resonating and connecting at that feeling and experience, I think is critically important for all of us to do.

Rachael Maves: [speaker uncertain] Yeah, you're right. We don't do it enough today. No. Well, and it t I mean it takes practice too, right? Like it's, it really is an intentional bringing it to the forefront and it takes practice to live in that. Space.

Nick Greer: Yeah, and it also and listen, this is a thing that I think is, in some ways, to bring it into the education world. Like I don't know that we're. I think it's happening in small pockets, but I don't know that we're helping our young people on a day-to-day basis. Let alone like the work I do today with organizations, executives, and other leaders. Like I don't think we're doing it enough on the small scale. Yeah.

In order to practice it on the large scale, right? And this is a thing that, adrienne maree brown talks about, an author and, talks a lot about like emergent strategy and all that kind of stuff, but I think they point out really well. That if, like, it's like a fractal, right? It's. It's like, if you can't do small d democracy, or you can't do like hard conversations at home with the people you love, or if you can't like actually like have be empathetic on a really small scale. If we don't practice that stuff in the classroom, on the, where it doesn't have as many stakes, right, as it does on the large scale, how can we expect and anticipate that we're going to grow up and be able to do this on such a large scale, behalf of such large needs as companies, organizations, countries, whatever.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Rachael Maves: On that note, what are, as you think about education and some of the things that are happening right now in that space, what keeps you up at? Night? What are the things that you feel like we really need to think about? Be thinking about too much?

Nick Greer: Yeah. You know, it's still like when I first started this podcast, it was still coming like off the tail end of the pandemic, but so much has shifted in that time that, like, I feel like the focus now, those things that are burdensome, have really changed. Yeah. I mean, so I'm also. I also have the vantage point of sitting on a state board, yeah, in Maryland, and you know I'm not here in the capacity of being a state board member, but I will say that just looking across the landscape, not only in Maryland but across the country, like there are so many things like that we can point to there's, there's increasing gaps across you. Pick the demographic right like young men and boys, black fight or race, right?

We could say socioeconomic. We could say the gender gap. I said young men and boys like special. Education. Obviously, like that, stuff is happening and has continued to happen, and our system, our systems, have not fully closed those gaps or proven that they can't. So, I mean, does that keep me up at night?

It's kind of like background noise. It's always there, and I think it's a thing that we're fighting for constantly. Acutely, what keeps me up at night is that I don't think that we are going back to a thing I just said, like we're not focusing enough on teaching people how to create a sense of belonging in the spaces where we organize. And so, if we're talking about like a classroom,. Yeah. I don't feel like our education prep programs are doing enough yet to support teachers and young teachers to come into a classroom and then say,: "Here's how I forge a relationship with a parent.

Here's how I forge a relationship with a young person.". That's obviously professional, right? And that's obviously like a bounded relationship, that is like within the binds of like what it takes to be a teacher, but at the same time, it is a way that allows a young person and their family to feel like they belong in that classroom. I mean, the pandemic did so many things. To us and taught us a lot, but one of the things that I think it really did was it gave parents a viewpoint on the classroom at a time when we were all going through massive upheaval and change and in a massive transition. And so the view that a lot of us got into our children's classrooms was probably the worst that we could have seen while we're sitting at home and teachers were trying to figure this out.

Yeah. At the same time, at the pace of the world changing and all the other things that was going on. And so what I worry about right now is that we've got to recapture that and reclaim that sort of like humanity and invitation to come back into the classroom for parents who have felt sort of locked out and like they don't have the kind of expertise that a teacher does in order to be what a parent really is, which is the first. Teacher. Yeah. You know the number of parents I'm.

I'm so a reason why I talk a little bit about parents is I'm a parent member on the board in Maryland and the number of parents that I hear from on a weekly basis that say I don't understand how to teach my child to read, because I don't understand these, like terms: what's a graph? What's a beam? What's a graphing? Like I learned how to sound it out right. Or like same with math, like the age-old story, like I don't know how to do new math, and I feel like we are not providing our parents with those resources, or even the invitation in so many. Ways.

Is it happening? Sure. It's happening in pockets. And you know, really great teachers, educators, leaders, school leaders are doing this and inviting their families in and community schools and providing a space, a safe space, for everyone to feel welcome. I just don't think we're doing it on a broad enough scale and I think it's creating more divides and more difficulty and I think it has a larger impact on learning than.

Rachael Maves: I agree with you and we just it wasn't recently, maybe a few weeks ago, maybe about a month ago. Now time is flying by Timi, one of our student. We had a student on the podcast, Timi Ilori, and what she was talking about. She's a freshman and she talked about her experience, erience, as a student going through the pandemic. And one of the things that she highlights is that need for human connection. And it was just interesting to hear it come from a student like it, like this kid that's saying this is what we need and it's so important and we feel like there's pieces of it but it's missing, you.

Know. And she really highlighted that experience of what it was like during the pandemic: having nothing and then coming back but still feeling like it's it wasn't quite enough and what does that mean and look like?

Nick Greer: So, yeah, and to that point, like you know, I taught between the years of 2003 to 2010 and over that period of time I also worked in Baltimore City schools, you know, for three or four years, a four or five years after that. But over that period of time I saw the advent of climate assessments and data around, like collecting the data from the students, the parents and the teachers,. Right? And the school staff, and that started to happen nationally, everywhere. And I remember I was in my classroom administering one of those assessments. This is like during home rooms, chaos time like, and I'm sitting there reading it, and I was like one of the questions that we asked the kids is: does a teacher know my name?

And I was like why is that a question? Like I remember being like a 26y old, like why is that a question? Why is that even a thing? And then, like I started to, like it opened my eyes. I started to understand like there are kids that walk through the halls and they never get called by name. Ever.

There's kids that walk into their classrooms and they never get called by name ever, and then they don't know. And if we have to ask the question, that it means that kids think or at least some kids think that adults don't care about them. Yeah. How long is it until I stop coming to school or until I divest in all of this and I just don't do it anymore? Yeah. Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Well, as we think about some of these pieces that you're bringing up, especially this component of connection,. What are two ways that you feel like we could move forward?

Nick Greer: You know, I think it's it's it's easy to point the finger at, like educator prep programs. I'm not going to do that. Like, I don't think that's 100% true and fair. I think a way to one way to move forward is for everybody to begin, and I mean the adults, right? Because those are the ones that are most in power. To begin sort of reflecting on what role they play in creating a sense of belonging.

Yeah. Right. Who they are. Go back to the thing I said kind of in the beginning around like reflect on who you are and what you bring to the table, what your trigger points are, what your like things are and how you play a role in that relationship, and step like kind of bravely, step one step closer to people. Even if it's across a line of difference. Yeah.

Another part of that then comes to another mindset shift. So this isn't like we can enact this in policy. It's it's build a sense of curiosity. So once you have an understanding of who you are, then be curious of who other people are and what they're bringing with them. I was just in a conversation yesterday where I asked the question of a person that I was sort of coaching and working with, where they were having an interpretation of people's actions as a blatant disregard for policy and rule. M right.

And then I said,: "Okay, so that's your initial. What's another interpretation that gives them the benefit without?"? And they like, "Oh, they're afraid.". How do we change our actions when we're working with somebody who's afraid? Versus the dirt? They have a.

They have a blatant disregard for the rules. Yeah. Right. Or the policy. And so, as a teacher, we can do the same thing. If I'm thinking of a child and I'm working with a kid and I'm thinking about them is like, is this a person who is set up from a place of fear or set up from a place of?

I don't feel like anybody cares about me here? Yeah. How am I going to change my interaction with them and the way that I'm showing up in that? Moment? Yeah. For them, because it's not that I think them as a person who is just trying to break the rules.

Nobody woke up this morning and they came just to try to break the rules. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Rachael Maves: I love what you said too, Nick, because I do feel like sometimes we overindex on policy where we're trying to si solve real problems in this space of well, if we just legislate more or more parameters in place and there are some things actually that it has more to do with the human side of it than it does in just putting those rules in place. And I think the danger can be that we think, well, we put the rule in place, now it should just shift, like everything should be in a different place and better, and then we act surprised when it's. Not.

Nick Greer: Yes. But and it's messier work, right? To slow down, to address the human side of it, to engage in the halo, like you're talking about the murkiness. That's right. And determine when we're making that change, like: what is it that I had in the first place that I can keep? What is it that doesn't serve me?

And how am I going to shift through that moment? And what do I need to keep with? I move through? Yeah. Yeah.

Rachael Maves: As you, as we wrap up our time together, Nick, I this is always my favorite question that I ask at the end, because everybody comes at it from such a different lens, but what is the one question in education that we're not asking, that you're not hearing people bring up that we really should be?

Nick Greer: So I hear a lot of arguments about. Parents' rights. I mean, a lot. And I feel like we're missing something here. I think that parents feel like they're locked out of a classroom, like they don't have access. And the way that they're working to regain that access, back to something you just said, Rachael, is like they're trying to legislate it.

That's right. Yeah. And I think the question that's not being asked is actually: why do parents feel like they need their, they need those rights? Like, why now?

Rachael Maves: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Greer: And what is it that we can be doing to actually forge and bridge connection or relationship with parents in a way that provides them? Like I said, maybe even a little bit earlier, the tools, the resources, the strategies to be the first teacher at home, which they really are, which we really are. And I feel like, you know, I'm not going to put this in the backs of teachers. Teachers are really busy. Administrators are really busy. It's really hard out there to do this.

There is a lot of content and there is a lot of jargon in the way that we teach, and to bridge that gap takes a lot of extra effort. Yeah. On behalf of a teacher. But I will say that it has created a space where now parents, I feel like, don't feel like they belong anymore, or that they don't have the kind of content, expertise that they need in order to support their kids in the way that they know is best. People. I want to be asking questions about why parents feel that way and I want to be asking questions about what we can do in order to shift that.

Dynamic. Yes. In Maryland, we tried to. We're revising the way that we are teaching and you know, we're fortunate here to have an fantastic state leader in Carrie Wright. And we are really at the beginning portion of this work, which is going to be very hard work moving forward. But I would say one of the things that we did was we didn't just take offtheshelf policy where it said: you know, if a student can't read by third grade, then they're held back.

We actually did the hard thing and we built into the policy an informed consent process for parents to have conversation with teachers and teachers to actually and schools to do some due diligence on building and forging a relationship with parents so that they are partners in the learning journey. Along the prek to three and that every parent, guardian, caregiver in that child's network is then set up and prepared to be able to support them. I think that is where you go to say: how can policy start to bridge this gap? A little bit, and it's going to come out in now seeing teachers, administrators, schools build and forge relationships with parents as if they are true partners in the learning journey, instead of asking parents to say, okay, I wave my right or okay, you know what's best, go ahead and do it. I don't even really No, instead, now I understand what the risks and the benefits are of. Retention and I've decided with you, the professional who's giving me the guidance, that this is the right course of action for my child, because I know them best.

I want to give that power back. Yeah. Yeah.

Rachael Maves: You know, one of the things, as I'm listening to you just talk about that engagement of parents. When I was at the California Department of Education, I started working with Learning Heroes. Led by, I know, Learning Heroes are Yes. And Cindi Williams, and it was so eyeoping to me to like hear a little bit just about, one, the gap of understanding of what parents believe, but then, two, they did so much research on the teacher side of the barriers and this feeling that teachers have of I don't know how to have these hard. Conversations. Like, how do you go to a parent and have this really hard, honest conversation that your child's like three levels below grade level and what they need and how they can support, like there's, there's just talking about fear, so much fear there.

And how do we equip teachers to be able to feel really confident in that work and what does that mean and look like and so that there really is that true partnership? Because I, what I fear sometimes and you guys are doing amazing work, Nick. So, this is just from my previous experience of what I've seen is that it becomes this: we want you to talk and have this mandate, but the teacher then is like, here's the. Information. Yeah. You know, and there's not the unpacking or the sitting side by side to really figure it out and creating the space even to be able to do that within a system.

Y, but I love that you guys are tackling this as a state. I think it's such important work and definitely a something that we'll be keeping an eye on of how this continues to unfold, because it really can set things up for, I think, precedent for others to learn.

Nick Greer: Yeah, I mean, I hope so. And I hope that we can do it a little bit differently than it's been done in the past, and I hope that it has a kind of. Outcomes. We'll be on it for the next few years, because change takes a lot of time.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, it does. And you know, when you say fear in that conversation, it's really true.

Nick Greer: I just want to end with maybe a story, if I can.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, please. Yeah.

Nick Greer: As a young teacher when I was in Pittsburgh, you know, nobody ever told me how to have a conversation with a parent. They just. They just kept saying like, "Call the parents. Call parents. Call the parents." And I'm like, "Okay.". And I'm like 22, right?

Like fresh out of college. And I'm like, what am I gonna do? And so I remember like procrastinating, procrastinating, procrastinating. And then finally I was like, I had a list of like 10 kids I needed to call. I was teaching high school. I was teaching seniors primarily.

And so I decided to make the calls at the last possible moment, mid Sunday afternoon. And I was also working in a school in which I was I ra. I was raised in a white community. I went to school in a primarily white institution and then I started working in a school in Pittsburgh that was nearly 100% African-American students, socioeconomic. I was very much an outsider. I was out of my element in the race space and the cultural space, not in the socioeconomic space, but for sure in the in those spaces.

I didn't realize it then, you know, I didn't know where the calling was kind of coming from, if there was one or. Whatever. And I stepped in to a hornets's nest on a Sunday afternoon because I made one phone call. It was literally the first one I made. And I called and the adult picked up and they were like, "Who is this? What?

We, who you're? You're calling on the Lord's day. Absolutely not. Never again. Don't ever call this house again on a Sunday.". And I was like, "I'm so, I'm sorry." And I just like I hung up the phone and I was like.

I'm not doing that again. Right. And I mean it was a long time before I started like trying to connect and make relationships with parents again. Yes. And I just I attribute a lot of that to like I didn't have anybody really showing me the ropes. I didn't have anybody talking to me about it.

I didn't have any like practice. The more we can kind of like. Practice this to your point, the more comfort we're going to build in it. And it does take time. Again, back to adrienne maree brown's fractals, right? If we can do it on a small scale, we can learn how to do it on a really large scale.

Yeah. Right. And I think if we can practice that uncomfort, that uncomfortable nature, that thing that sits inside of us, that's given us a fear of having a conversation with somebody that we don't know where it's going to go, how it's going to go. Then we might be able to overcome the honesty gap and we might be able to overcome the like the my child's report card is actually more important. Back to Learning Heroes is more important than the state assessment.

Rachael Maves: Right, because, like what I'm hearing from the teacher and what I'm, the grades they're getting is actually better than they actually how they're doing, which is not true. Right, like we know, it's just absolutely not true.

Nick Greer: Yes, and it's. It's partly because, you know, teachers don't practice talking to parents and giving hard feedback back and say, "Yeah, like here's what you can work on and here's the tools you have in order to do it.". And I think I we can just do so much better there, and I'm looking forward to like this being the phase of life that I support. That. Work.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I love that, Nick. Well, thank you for your time today. I really appreciate you having this conversation and carving out the space for it. I appreciate that you have the space to be carved out. So, thank you.

Nick Greer: This has been a lot of fun.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, for me, too. All right, everyone. A friendly reminder that Parsec Education's early bird sale is live. Get 50% off tickets for the 2026 Measure What We Value Summit happening February 4th through 5th in Fresno, California. Don't miss this limited time offer and the opportunity to experience our incredible MC Brandon Leak, season 15 winner of America's Got Talent. Secure your tickets now at.

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This transcript was created from the episode's captions and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors; please refer to the audio for exact wording.